Families

On 18 July, Louise Casey, head of the Troubled Families Programme, published a report called Listening to Troubled Families. It presents sixteen case studies of families participating in Family Intervention Projects, claiming that this is ‘a good starting place to inform our thinking and policy development’. Well, no it isn’t. This is policy-making by anecdote, more akin to tabloid journalism than serious research. Casey’s group is not representative of those targeted by the TFP, and it is certainly not representative of the multiply deprived families who make up the so-called 120,000 troubled families. This pseudo-research serves only to present the poor as dysfunctional, both as individuals and as families.

The number of children living in vulnerable families will rise to over one million by 2015 unless urgent action is taken, a new report has warned.

A research study for three leading children’s charities measured the number of families with children who are most vulnerable to adverse economic conditions, and how they will be affected over the next few years.

How poverty and/or low income are mediated and affected by family considerations are considered. These could be through practices, exigencies or condition, resources, processes and relations. Five main sets of ideas or concepts are considered as ways of framing key aspects of the approach: family practices and the way that family members organise their lives; capital (social and cultural) and how it is utilised through connections and networks; culture, including values, meaning, rules and the like; capacities in the sense of the resources and dispositions available to people to take action; and family solidarity looking at practices of reciprocity and mutual assistance among family members over and above personal interest.

Intra-household poverty has generally been conceptualised as a matter of gender inequality, with differential access to resources within the family/household leading to underestimation of the extent of poverty generally, and hidden or invisible levels of poverty within the family/household. Household-level surveys struggle to capture the unequal (and in many cases unfair) distribution of income within the household or family; the money management within the households; and the known willingness of mothers to forego their own material needs in favour of others, especially of their children. This conceptual note considers how the PSE: UK research can investigate this issue through questions directed at exploring systems of money management and partner responsibilities, time expenditure and economising behaviour.

Improved parenting is currently often advocated as the best route to improve outcomes for children and, explicitly, as a better alternative than reducing poverty. Past academic research has found strong links between poverty and children’s achievement and, operating both separately and relatedly, links between parenting and outcomes. By including elements of parenting and family relationships in the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey, the PSE: UK team aims to provide evidence about the relationship between poverty and aspects of parenting that have received significant recent political attention but which, as yet, have been the subject of limited empirical research.

The paper welcomes the initiative to set out a child poverty strategy, and its recognition that addressing these issues requires a long-term and wide-ranging strategy as well as a commitment to monitor this strategy with targets and indicators. The paper, however, notes a disjunction between the overall universalist aims stated in the strategy and the targeted approach of the strands set out to implement the strategy. The paper also notes that the narrow focus on tackling worklessness is insufficient.

Current government policy on social justice hinges on the claim that there are 120,000 ‘troubled’ families in Britain. In this paper, Ruth Levitas argues that if we interrogate the research on which this figure is based, it turns out to be a factoid – something that takes the form of a fact, but is not. The claim is used to support policies that in no way follow from the research on which the figure is based. Read a summary.

In this consultation response, the PSE: UK research team is highly critical of the Coalition government’s social mobility strategy and, in particular, its claim that the best way to tackle intergenerational mobility is to break the ‘the transmission of disadvantage from one generation to the next’. The PSE policy working paper dismisses the idea that poverty is ‘transmitted’ between generations as ‘simply incorrect’ and argues that the best way to tackle intergenerational disadvantage and low social mobility is to eradicate poverty among children and adults. Read a summary.

Families on benefits are neither better nor worse off if they separate, finds a new research report. This finding is contrary to the frequently heard view that the benefits system encourages and rewards couples who live apart. Working families on low incomes are just as likely to lose as to gain from living apart, once extra costs are taken into account.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation study uses detailed research on household needs to look at how the extra income compares with the extra costs when couples split up.

Married or cohabiting couples enjoy large-scale economies in living costs, new research finds, but substantial diseconomies when children or further adults are added.

Essex University researchers tried to identify the adjustment needed when comparing the incomes of any two families with a different size and structure – on the basis that poverty depends not just on a family’s income but also on their needs. To do this, the researchers analysed the relationship between income, demographic structure and subjective assessments of financial well-being by drawing on data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for the years 1991–2008.

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PSE:UK is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. ESRC Grant RES-060-25-0052.